Food shortages

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I was thinking of mentioning that but I don't think its worth arguing with LibertarianAS, he screams of troll

Food shortages may well happen. The primary causes being that we are over farming land all across the world, we are dedicating a large portion of land to feeding live stock, herbicides and pesticides are killing bees as well as eroding soil quality.

"Free-market" is as much a utopian dream as communism.

Yes that is so, also the EU's Common Agricultural Policy done not help with there use of food mountains to control prices.

The World Bank has released a statement inferring that a world food crisis is imminent. Food prices have remained high over the last two years but they are now around the same price as the peak in 2008. Since June 2010 more than 44 million people have slid below the poverty line as a result of higher food prices.

It is predicted that a 10% increase in the food price index could potentially lead 10 million more people into poverty. Inflation in the price of food is on average 5% higher in developing countries compared to developed countries. The World Bank’s study of the middle east and north Africa suggests food price inflation in Iran Egypt and Syria is well into double figures. The price of maize has increased by over 17% over the past year in this region.

The World Bank has suggested that “Policy actions that will reduce the pressures on tight global food markets include relaxing bio fuel mandates when food prices exceed a threshold level and removing export restrictions on grains. Investments in increasing agricultural yields in an environmentally sustainable manner, efficiency gains in food import supply chains, and greater use of risk-management tools such as hedging products are examples of medium-term policy goals to improve food security.”

source: http://www.whichwaytopay.com/money-late ... 2&zoneid=2

According to The World Bank's Food Crisis page the number of undernourished people in the world is 936,068,682 (and increasing at a rate of 1 per second). That's 1 billion out of 7 billion people or 14% of the planet's population.

World food crisis is imminent ~ World Bank, 2 years after the food crisis started.

Did Jesus breake his promise? The middle age was full of food shortages, earthquakes, diseases and rumors of war. Yet Jesus didn't come!


The causes are the constant bad climate and natural disasters and over population.

Pesticides make the food production more efficient. The evil mega corps are not stupid enough to erode their soil quality. Live stock is food.

How to overcome the crisis? Haha good luck. Either we will get more efficient at making food (asking people to stop eating the food you don't like is a futile effort and it is better to ask for more efficient ways to make it) or we will lose a good bunch of population once the crisis erodes into war. World war. After the world war we will get into a new time of "prosperity" until the over population skyrockets again, by then I hope we have space colonies.

How to survive the crisis individually? Sure, you may pray. Maybe you are special and everything will always be fine for you because a God picked you to survive. But perhaps there are more effective ways... My tip (as someone that has almost been through actual shortages) eat whatever you can eat. Whilst most people get angry for not being able to buy sugar, consider alternative ways to sweeten. If pork is too expensive, eat fish. If fish skyrockets, eat pork. Lettuce market over inflated? Consider spiders, I mean really, don't buy the same food everyone is trying to buy.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 26 Apr 2011, 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And earthquakes since the dawn of time as well, and it's perfectly normal for them to occasionally cluster. It would be unusual if they did not.

Actually the Irish potato famine may be a good example here. It's not a perfect parallel, but it was similarly the result of politically motivated trade regulation on the part of an industrial region affecting a less developed region.

British law and policy - restrictions on Ireland's international trade, plus ownership of Irish lands by English absentee landlords - caused Ireland's economy to be substantially based on cash crop exports, including animal products from sheep and cows. By the time of the famine, most Irish subsisted almost entirely on potatoes. Since potatoes are a very efficient crop, as long as the potato harvests held up, this not only supported the population but caused rapid population growth. However, the growing population, plus the dependence on a single food crop, made the island very vulnerable to famine when the blight hit, especially as the export of higher priced products, and even of potatoes, continued.

The modern industrial world's policies towards the third world have set up a similar situation. Modern fossil fuel based farming has resulted in crops that are extremely land efficient, as they get as much of their energy from the fertilizer as from the sun. Political considerations in the developed world have resulted in the subsidization of sales of surplus food crops to the third world. The subsidies mean that local third world farmers can't compete with imported food crops, and turn to nonfood cash crops instead. While the mechanism for cheap food is the different, the result in the third world is the same: rapid population increases and an emphasis on growing cash crops rather than on growing food for local consumption.

That again sets up a situation where those countries are vulnerable to famine. The part of the potato blight is played by rising oil prices. With increasing oil prices, the cost of producing fossil fuel based food crops increases. Production falls and there are no longer a lot of surpluses to export to the third world at subsidized prices. We start to see starvation in the third world because they can't afford the new, higher, prices of food needed to feed their swollen populations, and their farming economies are busy turning out nonfood cash crops. That's what the U.N. is worried about.

In retrospect, it would have been better to avoid subsidizing food exports to the third world in the first place, instead encouraging them to be self sufficient in food. It's a bit late to change that now, though.

But some markets are Free-er than others. One thing for sure, the totalitarian centralized Command Economy is doomed to failure. There has to be a component of individual enterprise and innovation for any economy to be viable. A Command Economy simply lacks the flexibility to survive variations in resource availability, natural disaster, climate changes, etc etc etc.

That is why Lenin abandoned strict Communism in 1924 with the New Economic Policy. Under Stalin it was the private gardens on the Collective Farms that kept the Soviet Union from starving completely.


ruveyn

Then why aren't we starving here in the U.S.?

ruveyn

Are you being sarcastic or do you really think that something is not global if it does not happen in the US?

But inflation is hitting you guys.

Global means everywhere in the world, such as global warming.

Inflation indeed. But few, if anyone, are starving.

There are kids in Uganda who would kill for what we throw in the garbage.

ruveyn

I'm gonna put on my demand-side economist hat for a second and say something logical:

The idea that we should burn food for energy in the form of ethanol derived from sugars and starches has in fact impacted a great deal of the agriculture market, ranging from shortages of rice (resulting in market controls like India banning the export of any rice of less than top quality) and the shortage of hops for the beer industry a few years ago due to some hop farmers converting fields to corn.

A market void increases demand, which incentivizes increased supply. We can see modern examples of this in markets like vanilla beans, which went from a constant supply to a severe shortage to a severe glut in less than a decade recently.

But burning food for fuel is still moronic, and we shouldn't subsidize it.

Burning food is completely insane. We can be converted certain varieties of wild grass which are indedible by humans, and get lots more ethanol than converted perfectly good corn.

The Ethanol racket is a subsidy to farmers which will drive the price of some food items right through the roof.

ruveyn

"Food prices worldwide have been rocketing. SA, though shielded to some extent, is now heading the global route. Shannon Sherry looks at what is driving prices and who benefits along the value chain."

"The crunch is coming. Food prices are at their highest since 1990. The UN Food & Agriculture Organisation food price index rose above the 200 mark for the first time in January and has stayed there for the first quarter of the year."

"As always, the situation is driven by supply and demand: world food stocks are generally down and the global population is growing, expected to reach 9bn by 2050. The huge populations of emerging giants such as China, India, Brazil, Russia and others are also becoming wealthier, causing changes in their food- consumption patterns. They are eating more and differently, with animal protein — generally meat — topping their list . There is, therefore, far greater global demand for the food we need."

http://www.fm.co.za/Article.aspx?id=141848

"World food prices are set to rise again as concerns persist over Chinese and U.S. winter crops and global production lags increasing demand, according to the head of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation."

"FAO Director General Jacques Diouf told Reuters Insider that rising output of biofuels was also contributing to food shortages, consuming more than 100 million tonnes a year of cereals that would otherwise be used in food production."

http://www.commodities-now.com/news/agr ... rices.html

While I'm not a fan of subsidized biofuels - as ruveyn says, we should be converting the stalks, not the grain - this is still only 5% of world grain production. The other 95% goes towards food, directly or indirectly. Ultimately, the primary cause of the problem is an excess of people.